SOURCE: "Dark Memories in the Early Voice of Novelist Ralph Ellison," in Christian Science Monitor, February 10, 1997, p. 14.

In the following review, Holmstrom provides a favorable assessment of Flying Home and Other Stories.

For Buster and Riley, two fictional African-American boys created by Ralph Ellison, ebonies is the only language they speak. In [Flying Home and Other Stories], this collection of short stories, including three about Buster and Riley, Ellison at least establishes that the speech patterns and clipped grammar of ebonies flourished in the 1930s and '40s between two boys.

Today black children in Oakland, Calif., speak ebonies and create a stir when school officials recognize it as valid.

Ellison, the author of the famed novel Invisible Man, published in 1952, also establishes in these stories—written before Invisible Man—that the racial segregation and bias that limited the lives of "colored" people decades ago linger today.